Political pressure continues to mount on TikTok, the super popular video app owned by China’s ByteDance. In the United States, TikTok is now banned on government devices as lawmakers debate how to address its Beijing ties. And around the world, 40 other countries have taken similar measures.
Meanwhile, Lemon8, another social network owned by the same Chinese company, has emerged and begun to top the charts. As its popularity surges in America, here are some things you should know about it.
What is this new thing?
Per materials it shared with marketing agencies in January, Lemon8 aims to “build the most inspiring and informative platform to discover, share, and bring ideas to life.” The go-to descriptor being used by almost everyone is Pinterest meets Instagram. The layout features two columns of content side by side; the feed’s focus is images (often product photos) and text (typically tips or recommendations), not videos like you see on TikTok. The app allows almost blog-length posts, which tend to be geared topically around what one might expect: fashion, fitness, cooking, travel. Downloads of the app have now shot past Pinterest, Tinder, and Zillow to become the App Store’s top lifestyle app.
Did ByteDance just release this app?
Lemon8 stealth-launched in the U.S. and U.K. markets back in February. But the app isn’t brand new globally: It debuted in Japan first in 2020. By 2022 it had eclipsed 5 million active monthly users worldwide, and had also expanded into Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Singapore. Previous reports have noted Lemon8’s somewhat obvious similarities to a popular Chinese lifestyle app known as Xiaohongshu (“Little Red Book”) that launched in 2013 and quickly gained traction among young women in the country.
What are Lemon8’s links to TikTok and ByteDance?
ByteDance is seemingly putting more distance between itself and Lemon8 than it did with TikTok. The App Store says Lemon8 is owned by a Singapore-based company called Heliophilia Pte. Yet reporters quickly discovered, by consulting Singaporean regulatory filings, that Heliophilia’s address is at TikTok’s local headquarters, and the app is headed by Alex Zhu, TikTok’s CEO before ByteDance acquired the app, and currently vice president of product strategy at ByteDance.
Two weeks ago, while TikTok’s current CEO, Shou Chew, was swearing before Congress that his app can be trusted on U.S. soil, ByteDance was busy inviting members of America’s creator economy to join its brand-new app.
“ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, invites you to become a launching creator on their new Lemon8 platform before it officially rolls out in the United States!” is how one pitch read, according to the New York Times. The document cited its “sister company” TikTok’s success, and added that Lemon8 used “the same recommendation engine that helps TikTok succeed.”
Other reporting, starting with Insider‘s back in February, says ByteDance began paying creators to post on Lemon8 immediately after its pilot launch, giving the app a roughly two-month cache of content by the time Chew was getting grilled in Washington.
How popular is Lemon8 becoming in the U.S.?
According to data that analytics firm Apptopia gave Axios, Lemon8 has been downloaded 17 million times globally since its March 2020 launch, and then 650,000 times in just the United States over the past week and a half. That’s enough installs to make Lemon8 the top lifestyle app on the App Store and No. 7 among Google Play’s lifestyle apps. It’s also reached No. 30 overall today on the App Store’s most-downloaded free apps list, sandwiched between DoorDash and Walmart.
Lemon8 seems to be leveraging its bigger sibling’s pull to drive downloads. In the earlier reports about ByteDance paying influencers to seed Lemon8’s U.S. version with content, creators say they were given a list of bullet points to follow in order to qualify for payment, and ultimately “catapult your post into stardom!” (Posts should be built around three to seven photos, for instance, and have 100 to 300 words that include “calls-to-action and hashtags.”)
Insider‘s February report included creators saying that Lemon8 reminded them of “Pinterest and Instagram when they just started,” or describing it as “a mix of Instagram and Pinterest.” Incidentally, a number of TikTok creators with large followings have been posting glowing reviews of Lemon8 lately that use near-verbatim verbiage. “It’s like Pinterest and Instagram came together and had a baby,” Gabrielle Victor recently told her almost half a million followers.
Let’s say I have some qualms about TikTok. Should Lemon8 concern me, too?
ByteDance is naturally eager to stay atop America’s app-download charts, whether it’s with TikTok or another equally popular app. With TikTok’s future now in limbo, possibly stretching to scenarios where ByteDance is forced to divest from the app completely, or the app is banned outright by countries, Lemon8’s shell-company-style setup suggests ByteDance may have quietly had a fallback plan percolating this whole time.
Now, it’s leaning in as regulatory heat intensifies on TikTok. ByteDance hasn’t addressed media inquiries yet about whether it anticipates Lemon8 will face similar scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators, and it didn’t answer Fast Company‘s own questions about how it plans to respond if that scrutiny occurs.
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